I have in my hands, metaphorically, a 30 day trial of Painter 12 and I am having a ton of fun with it. I spent the weekend messing around with the presets, then started making my own brushes and came up with this:

I liked the dry scratchy texture of the background, so I based the rest of the image around it. I thought I would shoot for sort of a medieval, no-depth-perception kind of look, though the Seussian landscape kind of betrays it. In fact... now that I look closer... that woman has a vanishing point! Burn her for witchcraft! (I will fix that later I guess.)

The trellis was done with Painter's stock impasto brushes in order to replicate the look you get from those thickish gel-ish pens whose ink dries raised off the page. You know, the kind that 9-year-old girls use to hand write birthday invitations... except with less glitter. (Also, I'm 95% certain that the 11th century artists I'm imitating had access to that technology. Ancient Aliens, man, it's on the History Channel. Look it up.)

Anyway, Painter 12. Super fun. Going to post more stuff as I play around more.

So when I took art classes in high school, I had this weird desire to paint faces in bright blue rather than skin tones. I guess azure would be the specific hue. I was never particularly good at putting human anatomy onto paper, but for some reason I was able to ken it a bit better when I used shades of blue.